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3DCreative: Issue 048 - August 2009 (Download Only)

Richard Tilbury is back again this month to bring us two inspired Photoshop tutorials for 3D artists! We'll see how to add lighting and particle effects to our 3D renders to improve our scenes without even touching the original render - a completely nondestructive way of working which will speed up your workflow and yield some stunning results. Then we have part two of the Custom Textures tutorial where Richard looks at how bump, specular and overlay maps can be utilized in Photoshop to create the illusion of detail without adding additional geometry to your 3D scene.

EDITORIAL

August 2009 brings you the 48th issue of 3DCreative. Which, if I'm not mistaken (and I've calculated this wrong before, so bear with me while I'll add this up…), is the mark of four whole years in production! Woo-hoo! It's been a great four years and we're happy to announce that we're going for five, so stick with us for more and more (and more) 3D into 2010!

So what's new this month? Well, you'll notice a slight change to 3DCreative in that we're going tutorial crazy from here on in and cutting back slightly on interviews and making of articles. We'll still have the gallery as normal, and the quality is certainly not going south, so we hope you'll like the changes we're making and enjoy all the tutorials we'll be covering now and into the future.

New to the August issue is chapter one of a three-part series on Creating Custom Textures, by in-house 3DTotal artist, Richard Tilbury. And what's more, we're giving away another great selection of Total Textures for FREE in this issue to accompany the tutorial, so forward-click to p.54 to get yourselves some free textures and learn some top tips from our very own texturing artist - who, by the way, worked previously as a texture artist for a U.K. games company before joining 3DTotal, and he sure knows his stuff!

3DCreative is all about tutorials now, so catch up with Joseph Harford on p.82 as he takes our next-gen character low-poly base mesh, created in last month's instalment, into ZBrush for the first of two-parts sculpting, before moving onto the mapping and unwrapping in chapter four of the series. James Busby (LightWave), Gavin Goulden (Maya) and John Hayes (modo) will be back with us in part four of the Next-Gen Character Creation tutorial series when Joseph hands over the high poly ZBrush sculpt for the mapping/unwrapping fun to begin!

Also in its second chapter this month we have part two of Photoshop for 3D by Richard Tilbury, who takes us through retouching final renders, and our ZBrush Manimal Creation tutorial hits part three this month with Brazilian artist, Diego Maia returning to 3DCreative to take us through the production of an Aquatic-Man, on p.38. Diego also gives us some ZBrush rendering tips, the result of which is this month's front cover feature!

Our artist interview featuring in this month's magazine is with Californian-based artist, Christophe Desse, who teases us with sunny beach stories (whilst we sit here under what seem to be forever gray skies), and tells us a little about his move from film and advertising into real-time projects. You'll no doubt have seen one of Christophe's stylized cars featured in last month's gallery, so you can now take full advantage of our interview and delve straight into his portfolio on p.6.

Finally, our making of has been kindly contributed by Marco Aurelio Magalhaes da Silva, another talented Brazilian-based artist who talks us through his workflow when dealing with inorganic subjects, such as this beast of a car, the Mustang Shelby 67, on p.66. And before you leave us and wait patiently for next month's issue, be sure to check out our top picks in the gallery, with images by Andrei Cristea, Stéphan Brisson, and Christian Rambow just to name a few - p.14 is the one want!